


We Cannot Make Our Sun Stand Still

by WaterandWin



Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Espionage, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Non-Linear Narrative, Plot-heavy, post-CATWS, red room flashbacks
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-20
Updated: 2014-08-23
Packaged: 2018-02-09 15:17:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 22,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1987749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WaterandWin/pseuds/WaterandWin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve is looking for Bucky. Bucky is looking for revenge. Natasha is looking to return a favor. Sam is looking at his life and wondering how he managed to get himself into this one (he doesn't regret it one bit).</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. -

**Author's Note:**

> Before anything else, I have to give credit to [Alice](http://stuckyassemble.tumblr.com) for not only beta'ing this monster of a first chapter, but also bugging me to write it after I showed her a very early, very incomplete draft of it. Safe to say, none of this would exist without her. She doesn't even ship BuckyNat! So go thank her. She was fantastic and a great sport through all my indecisions, and you should all follower her blog cause she's a real sweetheart. 
> 
> This actually brings me to my next point, since I'd also like to give fair warning to all of you right now that I am an avid multi-shipper and at different points in the scheming process of this story I considered making it Steve/Bucky, Steve/Nat, and in a moment of weakness and exasperation, some flavor of horrible polyamory. At the time that I actually started writing, I had completely thrown my hands in the air in defeat to let the story sort itself out, which is why you might be confused to find a Winter Window fic that starts from Steve's point of view. Never fear! I have (most of) a plan. Trust me on this one.
> 
> Last but not least, the title. It's from an Andrew Marvell poem called _[To His Coy Mistress](http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/his-coy-mistress)_ , because love and time are what we're really all about here, aren't we? Least that's what I'm here for.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Steve and Sam make a discovery and embark on an adventure.

Bucky had always had a gift for disappearing. It had been a bad habit of his since childhood. His mother was often heard complaining about it to the other mothers, or to her daughters, or even sometimes to no one at all. “That boy,” she would say with an exasperated sigh. “I turn my back for one minute!”

It usually happened when he had done something wrong. Steve had nearly broken the habit once when they were ten, when Bucky put a baseball right through Mr. Oliver’s kitchen window and promptly evaporated from the scene. It was Steve then who went and knocked on the old man’s door with a confession, and Steve who was dragged by the ear three blocks back home to his mother. The welts from Mr. Oliver’s belt took a week to heal. Bucky didn’t do too much disappearing after that, least not when it was him that was in trouble.

Even during the war, Bucky had a way of becoming invisible. He could read the landscape like he’d grown up roaming every inch of it, scarcely needing to make use of topographic maps when it came to finding a hiding spot from which he could see everything and be seen by none. And when Bucky vanished, he really vanished. Sometimes it was impossible to even tell where the sniper fire was coming from.

But never, in all the years they had known each other, had Bucky ever hid himself from Steve.

The Winter Soldier’s decades of espionage had served him well. As far as anyone was concerned he was at the bottom of the Potomac under one hundred and fifty tons of wreckage. In fact there was so little evidence to the contrary that it became the official story. There were a few dissenters who wanted to believe that the great ghost story of the 20th century couldn’t be snuffed out that easily, but Steve knew better. As far as he was concerned, _Bucky_ couldn’t be snuffed out that easily. It had been neither tide nor fever dream that had saved his life. He was out there somewhere. He had to be.

So Steve looked. He and Sam started with hospitals in the area. No John Does had been checked in recently with anything more than a metal hip. No amputees either. They widened their search. With rumors flying in from all directions, it proved surprisingly difficult to track down a man with a metal arm. They checked everything from airport security tapes to bus stop surveillance in every location within a hundred miles. They looked into petty thefts of food, water, medical supplies. Time passed, the search widened, and each time they came up empty handed, with nothing to show for their efforts. It was like Bucky had simply slipped out of existence entirely.

“Or maybe he’s really gone,” Sam finally said one night. He said it real quiet like, with a comforting hand on Steve’s shoulder, but a blow was still a blow.

Steve was on his feet so quickly the bare bulb over the kitchen table swung slightly from its wire. He opened his mouth to say something. A thousand incredulous thoughts fought their way to the forefront, and all the while Sam looked at him with that support group look on his face. Steve promptly shut his mouth, then reconsidered and opened it again.

“You don’t— you don’t know that,” was his best and only argument. He hated the way it sounded even as he said it.

“It’s been four months,” Sam replied. “Which, granted, ain’t all that much in the grand scheme of things, but we’ve got, what, an old museum surveillance tape? How much since then?”

“He’s out there,” Steve insisted.

“Well if he is—and that’s a pretty big if—my guess is that he isn’t too keen on being found.”

“Or he’s been captured,” Steve listed off on his fingers. “Or he’s hiding from HYDRA who’s trying to get him back. Or we’re just not looking hard enough! It’s any number of things, Sam. Are you asking me to just give him up now that I know he’s alive?”

“What I’m asking you— Steve, look.” Sam ran a hand over his hair. “I know you’re not the kinda guy to put yourself first. I get that. So it’s about high time I did that for you. To put it bluntly, you’re a wreck, man. And that’s saying something considering the kind of shit I’ve seen you put yourself through. I mean when was the last time you slept through the night? Ate an actual meal for once? Speaking strictly as your friend on this, I think you need to step back. Take a break.”

Steve shook his head as if to swat the words away. “You know I can’t do that.”

Sam heaved a loud sigh of resignation. “Oh, believe me, I know. America doesn’t back down, right?” He dragged himself over to the fridge in defeat, opened it up, and stared inside. It was mostly empty.

“Out of beer?” Steve asked a little too quickly, grateful as anything for a change of subject. “I could go get some.”

Sam cocked an eyebrow. “You don’t even drink.”

“Yeah, but I could use the fresh air,” he confessed. Besides, he was already pulling on his shoes and baseball hat and thick-rimmed glasses, and patting his pockets for wallet and keys. Sam just waved tiredly at him and resigned himself to the couch. Steve did feel a bit a bad for him, in a way. There are few people as stubborn as he was, but this mission especially was one he could not compromise on. He was glad at least to have had Sam by his side for this long. He gave the back of Sam’s head one last look, then shut the door behind him.

He took the stairs. The sky over Portland had gone dark hours ago. It was around this time that most shops in the area started to close for the night, but if Steve remembered correctly there was a 7-11 about five blocks from here. Or was that in the last city they’d stayed? He decided it was worth a shot anyway, and so he went.

Five blocks later, he turned out to be wrong. The corner where he thought it would be proved to be home to a Polish deli, but the loss was not too great; in the windows were posted numerous advertisements for various beers Steve couldn’t even read the names of. He was studying the signs as if it would divulge to him Sam’s opinion on foreign beers when, completely out the blue, he saw it.

It was quite small and altogether easily missed, nothing more than a little smudge of a shape drawn in black permanent marker on the glass in front of one of the ads. It was jagged, but it was clearly an hourglass. Whoever drew it chose an ad with a red background. Inverted Black Widow. Unmistakable.

The last anyone had seen of Natasha was at Fury’s funeral. Much like Bucky, she had also managed to dissolve from existence without so much as a trace, though in her case Steve was fairly certain that if she should need him, she would find a way to get in touch. Of course, her usual modus operandi was a phone call from an unlisted number or simply showing up behind locked doors with no explanation. Graffiti in plain sight was something new, if it was even her. There was only one way to know for certain.

Steve tilted down his hat, shoved his hands into his pockets, and shouldered open the door. A bell jangled overhead.

“We’re closed,” the woman behind the open register said in a thick accent. Sure enough, she had her coat on already. Under any other circumstances, Steve would have apologized and stepped back out.

“I’ll be quick,” he promised instead, and launched himself down the nearest aisle to the refrigerators.

There was only one crate left of the beer from the marked ad in the window. He grabbed it and brought it back to the register where the old woman had put her hat down on the counter and stood with her arms crossed tapping her foot.

She looked disinterestedly from the beer to the man. “ID please.”

Steve set the box down next to the register and pulled out his wallet. Out of habit he reached for the ID with a fake name on it, then stopped himself. If this is really Natasha he is dealing with, his alias didn’t matter; she knew them all. But she also knew how much he hated all this under the table espionage. Surely, in whatever trail of breadcrumbs she left for him, she would have accounted for him being aboveboard and honest.

He handed the woman his real driver’s license. She studied it over the top of her glasses, but if she recognized the name, her face gave away nothing.

“1981,” she said instead as she handed it back, referring to his adjusted birth year. “Pah, in 1981 I was already on third husband. First two?” She pulled a finger across her throat and cackled to herself.

Steve wasn’t sure if he was meant to laugh or if she was being serious. He managed a half-hearted chuckle somewhere in between. “How much?” he asked.

She seemed amused at his reaction. “Will you be wanting anything else?”

“No,” he shook his head. “Just this.”

“Nonsense, nonsense,” she tuted cheerfully. “Look at you, _malchishka_ , you have moths eating through your clothes.” Steve followed her eyes to his sleeve. He had to pull on it to see what she’s looking at, revealing the spot where a bullet had grazed his arm a few weeks ago. He looked sheepishly back at the shopkeeper.

“This is what you are needing,” she told him, pulling a black jar out from under the counter. The label was entirely in Russian, but there was a picture of a black spider on it. “You spread this where bugs live, bugs will die, I guarantee.”

“No, I really don’t need—”

“But do not leave too long.” She wagged a finger at him, suddenly very serious. “If leave too long, will kill spider, too. Spider dies, bugs come back, bugs eat everything. Spider very important. Understand?”

She looked at him with such intensity Steve found himself nodding. There was a cold dread at the bottom of his stomach, and a buzzing urgency that said she wasn’t talking about arachnids.  

“Good.” She slapped the counter. “Together is twenty-six eighteen.”

He paid and left in more of a rush than would have been polite. Once outside, he rounded the corner and immediately broke into a run. The beer bottles all clanked together in their box and he didn’t care one bit.

When he burst through the door, the knob hit the wall with such a resounding whack that Sam jumped off the couch like it bit him. His eyes were wide and bleary from sleep.

“Shit,” he gasped. “Are you trying to give me a heart attack?”

Steve hardly even registered anything was said to him. He made straight for the kitchen table and pushed empty pizza boxes out of the way so he could throw down his purchases. He only stopped to tear off his fake glasses before pulling the jar out its bag. Sensing the urgency, Sam didn’t comment on the fact that he’d left the front door wide open. He swung by to close and deadbolt it without a word before coming around back to the kitchenette, where Steve had managed the jar of insect poison open with a loud pop.

Turned out, the jar wasn’t black afterall, though it might as well be as it was filled to the brim with a tar-like black substance that smelled like it would burn a layer of skin off at the touch.

“Spoon,” Steve muttered, and scurried over to pull one from the drawer.

Sam gave a quizzical look to the forgotten box of foreign beer before picking up the mysterious jar.

“What is this?” he asked.

“An S.O.S.” Steve explained as he took the jar back. “From Natasha.”

Sam watched as Steve swirled the spoon around inside. “And what are you doing to it?” he asked.

“Deciphering,” he grunted. “The woman at the shop—I don’t think we have a lot of time.”

There was a nervous electricity coming off of him that made the hairs of the back of Sam’s neck stand on end. The spoon thing clearly wasn’t working; the goo was too thick.

“Here,” Sam said, reaching forward to take the jar. “I have an idea.”

“I’m checking for any—”

“Just hand it over,” Sam insisted. Steve did. Sam took out the spoon and hurled the jar at the floor.

Black goo splattered across the linoleum with the shattering of broken glass and a banal squelch. Shards flew out in all directions, but the poison was thick enough that the mess it mostly contained to about six square feet of damage, though spreading at the edges. In the middle of it all was a tiny tube of white paper. Steve snatched it up immediately. He unrolled it, and Sam stepped over the mess to peek at it over his shoulder. It didn’t make for the best of views.

“What does it say?” he asked from up on his toes.

“It’s.” Steve squinted and attempted to wring the small bit of paper between two fingers of the remaining black tar. The piece was quite small and not all that well preserved.

“It’s?” Sam asks.

“It’s an address!” Steve realized suddenly. “Sam, it’s an address!” He peered closer. “Four sixty.... seven? 467. 467 B.... Bellview? Bellview Street?”

“Bellview? But that’s—”

“Nine blocks from here,” Steve finished. “Sam, we need to—”

“I’ll get the shield,” Sam said, already on his way.

* * *

This was how, shortly after midnight, Steve and Sam found themselves pacing up and down a single block of Bellview Street looking for number 467, of which there appeared to be no trace. There was certainly a 465 Bellview, and a 471, but the two otherwise completely unobtrusive storefronts were adjacent, leaving no room for a 469, much less a 467. Sam stopped and scratched the back of his head.

“You’re sure the house number was 467?” he asked, not for the first time. He would have very much liked to doublecheck the scrap of paper, but as was the way with such things, the clue dried up and crumbled into dust minutes after being exposed to the air.

“Completely,” Steve replied, though his answer was somewhat muffled by his saying so with his nose pressed up against the glass of 465. His hands were cupped around eyes to get a better look inside the dark space on the other side. It looked to be a fairly small establishment; a large desk sat facing the front door, topped with pamphlets of various sorts and an old desktop computer. Posters of exotic beaches papered the walls.

“Say,” Steve wondered. “What with the internet and all, why do you still have travel offices?”

Sam looked over to 471, which contained a perfectly ordinary looking deli. “I don’t know,” he replied. “What does a travel office do, exactly?”

“Book flights, hotels, that sort of thing, I think.” Steve took a step back to look the door up and down, and then down both ends of the empty street.

“Yeah, you can basically do that sort of stuff from home nowadays,” Sam agreed. “Hell, you could probably do it from your phone.”

“Thought so,” Steve said, and slammed the edge of his shield against the lock on the front door. It crumpled like aluminum foil. “Let’s see how they’ve adapted their business model to the modern day.”`

By now completely unsurprised with seeing The Great American Icon breaking and entering, Sam followed the man inside.

“Kinda smells funky in here,” he noted immediately.

Otherwise, sure enough, it was a perfectly ordinary, quaint little office. Up against the wall was a large bookshelf of travel guides, but when Steve gave it a push there was nothing behind it but solid wall. Sam strolled behind the desk and ran his fingers absentmindedly along the surface. They came back covered in dust.

“Looks like no one’s been here in a while,” he noted as he eyed the little desk calendar still flipped to a date two weeks prior. He nudged the computer mouse, and the monitor came to life to display a login screen.

Sam looked up to see if Steve had found anything, and suddenly found himself alone in the little office.

“Hey,” he called. “Where did you go?”

“Back here.” Steve poked his head from around a corner that Sam hadn’t even noticed. “I don’t think we’re the first ones to find this place. Come look at this.”

When Sam walked over, he found a small inlet that lead to a wooden door, presumably leading back further into the building. Plastered top to bottom on the door was a poster of some palm trees. The unpleasant smell, whatever it was, was stronger here.

“This way, actually,” Steve said when Sam made right for the it. He jerked his thumb toward one of the walls, and—before Sam could say anything—disappeared straight through.

Sam reached forward to touch the gaudy poster of a sunset that hung in the space Steve had just occupied and instead found his fingers slipped directly to the other side as if there was nothing but thin air in the way. When he wiggled his hand, the whole wall seemed to shimmer slightly. He let out a low whistle.

“Guess we found the place,” he said as he ducked inside.

Here, a second miniscule hallway lead to a much more menacing metal door. There was no knob, only a number combination pad. Or rather, there had been a number pad. What was left of it now dangled on a few remaining wires. Even with the metal all gnarled it was hard to miss the little hydra embossed at the top of it. Beyond the keypad, someone had twisted a few of the loose wires together.

“You didn’t do that, did you?” Sam asked

Steve shook his head and gave the door a light push. It swung right open to a dark flight of descending steps.

Immediately, the smell intensified. Sam pulled his sleeve to his mouth to keep from retching, and even Steve was forced to do the same. It was now distinctly the stench of rotting meat.

“After you,” Sam said.

“Right,” Steve said, securing his shield on his forearm. “Our first priority is to look for Natasha. We don’t know who else is down there though, so stay alert. I’ll take the front. You cover me.”

Sam nodded and unclipped his gun from its holster. The stairwell was pitch black to his eyes, but Steve could discern the outlines of the walls and the steps clearly enough to see when the hallway turned, and then turned again. Soon enough, a bit of light could be seen from a doorway. Steve silently motioned them forward.

This door, too, had its security measures ripped from their hinges and hung open slightly. Sam readied his gun and Steve pushed. Nobody shouted. No alarms rang. There were no bullets. The only sounds were the creak of the hinge and that of flies buzzing over about half a dozen corpses in lab coats.

The lab itself was a wreck. Two steps in, Sam nearly jumped out of his skin when Steve accidentally trod on a broken beaker. Paperwork was fanned about on countertops and floors. Steve eyed some bulletholes in the walls and cabinets.

“Guess we missed the party,” Sam muttered dryly. He prodded one of the bodies with is toe until it turned over enough so he could see her face. Although decay had set in, it was obvious from the large caliber rounds tearing through her torso that whoever had shot her was not aiming for accuracy. He was relieved not to recognize her as Natasha, as unlikely as the possibility was.

“Looks like we’re clear. Should be safe to split up for now,” Steve said as he wedged his bluetooth into his ear. Sam did the same. “Give me a call if you find anything. Keep an eye out for survivors.”

“Will do,” Sam agreed, and they gave each other a not before going separate ways.

There were several doors leading off from the main room. Steve’s led into a short hallway. There was a dead man slumped against one wall, his chest riddled with a spray of bullets that pockmarked the concrete behind him. It was excessive, just like the others had been. From what Steve knew of Natasha, this was not her style. The accuracy of the shot showed skill, but the quantity revealed something else entirely. Anger. Personal motive. Steve’s heart beat a little faster.

He checked the rest of the hallway quickly. There proved to be little of interest besides more bodies that were not Natasha’s. All but one were killed by gunfire. One young man, knife still inches from his fingers, had had his head smashed against a wall with so much force there was little head left to speak of. Steve tried to picture Natasha doing as much and failed. It would have taken more strength than most humans could reasonably possess. He swallowed, dry-mouthed, and tried to keep himself jumping to conclusions.

The effort was wasted. In the next room, beside two more dead agents, was all the proof he needed. A steel weapons locker hung open in the corner. It was empty, but it was the container itself Steve couldn’t take his eyes off of. One of the doors was untouched, while the other just barely clung on by one hinge. Near the lock the metal was all twisted. Steve held his left hand up to the wreckage, and found the indents matched almost exactly. It was as if someone had torn the locker open with their bare hand, but human flesh couldn’t cause that kind of damage to solid steel.

“Cap?” Sam’s voice suddenly interrupted. “You might wanna see this.” Steve couldn’t tear his eyes away from the handprint. “Hey,” Sam’s voice prompted a second later. “You copy?”

This brought him back. “I copy,” he replied hurriedly. “Where are you?”

“Archives. Second door on the left from the main room, then the third on your right.”

“Second left, third right,” Steve repeated. “I’m on my way.”

The third room on the right turned out to be much, much bigger than any of the others he had been looking through. Steve wouldn’t have been surprised if it ran under the entire block and then some, just rows and rows and rows of metal shelves as far as the eye could see. The shelves by the door were all stacked with filing boxes, but as Steve looked further off he saw a distant figure waving furiously to get his attention.

He jogged to close the distance. What he found was a clearing in the shelves, big enough to house a large metal table and a few old computers. Across the table’s surface was a sweep of scattered files.

“What is all this?” Steve asked.

Sam held up a file folder. Across the top it read _ENGLISH:_ , and right below that, _PROJECT: WINTER SOLDIER_. The folder was empty. Sam gestured to the pages strewn in messy piles around the table.

“I think your friend’s been here,” he said. “Is this like the old man version of googling yourself?”

Steve swept past him to get a better look. A lot of the pages he recognized from the file Natasha had given him months ago, but some were ones he had never seen. There must have been a hundred pages on the table, maybe more. Some, he realized, hadn’t come from the Winter Soldier file at all. In fact, as he looked closer, he realized most didn’t. He flipped one of the folders shut to look at the front of it and a cold weight settled in his stomach.

 _ENGLISH:_ , it read. _PROJECT: BLACK WIDOW_.

The pages still inside were dated to the mid 70s. Steve started around the table, eyes scanning for more. Sam stepped in to peek at the file.

“What are we looking for?” he asked, flipped back a few pages.

“I don’t know,” Steve muttered. “Something Natasha wanted us to find, but this doesn’t make sense. Look at this. May 1957, October 1965, February 1987... Zola said Natasha was born in 1984. They all say Black Widow but... this can’t be possible.”

“Could there have been more than one Black Widow?” Sam asked. “Is it like, a family business?”

Steve didn’t have a good answer for that. None of this made any sense. Bucky had to have been here, that much he could be sure of, but what was this Black Widow business? What did she have to do with anything? What could Bucky possibly want with—

“He’s after her,” Steve realized suddenly. He looked up, horrified. “Sam, Natasha was trying to tell us he’s looking for her! But... why? Why go through all this trouble to—”

“I know why,” Sam cut him off. There was a sheet of paper in his hand.

Steve circled around the table to get a better look. It was file summary, a cover page with a chart full of start and end dates, places and names. The last entry at the very bottom was incomplete. There was a start date for last April, and an address in Washington, DC. _Alexander Pierce_ , one column read; _Nicholas Fury_ , the one beside it. No end date was listed. And as if that were not enough, the entire row had been crossed out with what appeared to be—Steve smudged it with his thumb to be sure—red lipstick. Natasha.

There were other rows crossed off, too.

“They’re all in the continental U.S.,” Steve observed. Sure the locations on the list spanned the globe, but the ones crossed off were all American.

“Yeah, that’s weird, but I’m looking up here,” Sam pointed. Near the very top of the list, where there should have been an address, someone had written in RR. The start and end dates bracketed a large chunk of the ‘60s. Steve’s eyes skimmed to the end of the line to the column reserved for what he could only assume were targets, where Sam’s finger rested.

 _Instructor: Wolf Spider Ops., Black Widow Ops. Multiple targets. See file._ , the box read.

“You think Natasha would have thought to mention that,” Steve said coldly.

“She must not have thought it was important,” Sam replied. “But if we’re looking for a connection, this has gotta be it. Now we just need figure out what all these marked rows she left us mean.”

“It means,” Steve said, glaring at a crossed off row marked 467 Bellview St., Portland OR, “Bucky’s been busy.”

Disappearing was not the only bad habit Bucky had as a kid. He had had one far nastier, and that was his vengeful streak. Coupled with his uncanny ability to hide it, it wasn’t until they were seventeen and Johnny Peters—having one afternoon managed to break Steve’s wrist—came into school the with a shiner Steve couldn’t possibly have landed on him that Steve put all the pieces together. He glared up at Bucky. Bucky had a self-satisfied grin on his face and the gall to wink at Peters as he walked by. It was a habit that Steve never did manage to dissuade him of, and so the Peters incident was neither the first nor last time Bucky would finish Steve’s battles for him behind his back. In fact, it became more of a way of life than anything; Steve started fights, Bucky finished them.

“These are all HYDRA bases they kept him at,” he explained when Sam gave him a puzzled look. “I’d wager Natasha’s been keeping track of the one’s he’s... cleared out.”

“Why?”

“Getting even. Leaving fights unfinished never sat well with Bucky. He’s getting back at ‘em.”

“No no, I mean why has Natasha been keeping track of him without telling us?” Sam grumbled. “She knew we’ve been looking. You’d think she’d find time to shoot us a memo like, ‘hey guys, thought I should let you know the guy you’ve been looking for is murdering HYDRA bases left and right while you’re holed up rewatching convenience store surveillance tapes and twiddling your thumbs’.”

“I think the real question we should be asking ourselves is why she chose to tell us now,” Steve said. There would be time for being cross with Natasha later, but with her life still possibly in danger, the current moment was not it. “What’s different? What’s changed?”

“It’s personal?” Sam guessed, gesturing to the Black Widow files scattered around the table. “I don’t think Natasha would be dragging us into this unless she really thought she was in over her head. But then that raises the question of why it got personal in the first place. I mean if he’s working down a list, you’d think he would have made the connection sooner.”

Steve’s eyes lit up.

“What if he’s not working off this list?” he muttered. There was a smile testing the corners of his face. “What if he’s remembering it?”

Sam looked up at Steve, then down at the list again. It made sense, but it just felt crazy to imagine the dude that had walked into the middle of a three-lane highway and totalled Sam’s car to have spent four months just stumbling around the country chasing ghosts of memories. If that were the case, he had at least been thorough.

“Guess we’ll just have to find out,” Sam resigned, handing the paper Steve. “Where to, Captain?”

To his credit, Steve was at least trying not to look pleased as punch. When addressed by rank, he fell seamlessly back into professionalism.

“Well, we have to find Natasha,” he began. “And we’re still looking for Bucky. And now we know that Bucky is also looking for Natasha, and my guess is that Natasha is still looking for him. I mean, she had to be to find this place and all the places on that list, right? So hopefully if we find one of them, the other won’t be far off, right?”

“It hurts my head just thinking about it,” Sam groaned. “Let’s just say everybody is looking for everybody else at this point.

Steve studied the list. “The closest one to us that’s not crossed off right now is in Vancouver, but we would have to move fast. If they find each other before we find either of them, we’re back to square one.”

“Find two deep cover Russian spies before they find each other,” Sam summarized. “Sounds like a real walk in the park. When do we start?”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Glossary**  
>  _malchishka_ \- in this context, a term of endearment for a small, trouble-making boy. Think Peter Pan's lost boys: scrawny, defiant, and impossible to keep clean or out of trouble.


	2. [R E D]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Natasha makes new friends.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You guys caught me completely off guard with all your support. Thank you so much! With motivation like that I can't help but bring you the next chapter a few days early. It's a short one, but I hope you like it anyway. 
> 
> Also, before I forget, you can find my writing blog [here](http://waterandwin.tumblr.com). I'll post period status updates there if there's ever a delay in getting a chapter out, along with other goodies and questions and things. 
> 
> Enjoy!

Her memories wear rose-tinted glasses, and it took her many years to learn to take them off. The key, she found, was to find the edges between the reality and the fiction. When she closes her eyes she can see the ballet school and the girls she called her sisters; she can see them standing in neat rows practicing their stances and their movements, again and again in perfect order; she can see the blood and sweat and tears that went into their hard work, and the praise they got for their performances for bringing glory to Mother Russia.

But if she picks at the edges, eventually those layers of pink bliss will peel away like sheets and sheets of delicate film. It’s painful work, cold and lonely, and when she’s finished, she finds she is so deep inside herself it’s hard to find the surface.

There were no ribbons or frills or music in the Red Room. There were girls, yes, over two dozen but the numbers dwindled over the years; they would stand in neat rows practicing their aim and their combat, again and again in perfect order; there was blood, and sweat, and tears, and faceless men that praised their kills for bringing glory to Mother Russia. Natasha was both one of their number and watching from outside herself, as the little girl with fire in her hair—meticulously trained to hide and listen and take lives before she was even old enough to understand their value—grew into a woman. And when the girls were all women, fully grown, they were taken one by one into the medical labs and never seen again.

“It will make you stronger,” the doctor told her. His Russian was rigid and heavy with German accent. “So you can better serve your country.”

She believed him, every word. Even as the needles shot agony into her muscles and the metal box closed in around her, she believed him. Even as the electricity stopped her heart, she believed him. She believed him to her last, ragged, screaming breath, and she believed him when she emerged again, remade.

If one were to scour the records for the birth date of one Natalia Romanoff, they would find many. Later sources would agree she must have come into this world in the midst of the Battle of Stalingrad, in the dead of the winter of 1943, as the tides were finally turning in favor of the Soviets. But fitting and poetic as that would be, it was simply not the case. If a girl had indeed been born then, she died that day in 1963, in the midst of a much different war. In her place, a woman emerged fully formed from the mind of a man who thought himself god. Like an ancient goddess of wisdom and war, she was born stronger and faster than any woman before her, engineered to heal fast and age slow. _Alianovna_ , they called her, for she had no father whose name she could take, and so the very alienness of the nature would have to serve where no man could.

When she awoke, she was alone. There were no more sisters. She was strong, she was told. Stronger than the others. They congratulated her. She knew better than to cry. She had a weapon in her veins now, they told her. There was only one man in all of Russia who could say the same. Who was he? she wanted to ask, but she did not because she knew better than to speak out of line. They told her anyway. They told her, and they took her to him.

She recognized immediately that the man was different, because he was young and he was foreign and he was dead. He sat in a sprawling metal chair with an unearthly stillness, and like some Adonic statue, it was difficult to look away. When Natasha walked into the room he looked at her and right through her all at once, and then he simply stared into unfocused nothingness as a man in medical uniform tightened a bolt inside his metal arm.

“Welcome, Agent Romanoff,” said the third and final man in the room. He extended a hand for Natasha to shake. She looked to the woman on her right for permission and received a nod of consent. She shook it.

“My name is Alexei Shostakov,” the man continued. He had a smile on his face that Natasha did not trust.

“At your service,” she replied none the less. He smiled wider.

“I’d like to introduce you to someone,” he said. He looked at the dead man seated beside him. The dead man did not look back. “Project: Winter Soldier. He will be your teacher for the remainder of your studies. You will address him as Sir.”

Natasha nodded. “At your service, Sir,” she said, but he didn’t seem to hear her.

For the first time, Shostakov frowned. “Focus here now,” he said, snapping his fingers a few times in front of the Winter Soldier’s face. The soldier blinked, and then stood so suddenly that the technician’s screwdriver flew out of his hand.

“This is your student,” Shostakov continued like this hadn’t happened. “Go on, shake her hand.”

The soldier turned his gaze from Shostakov to Natasha. She did not expect this time to find it so fiercely intent. When she shook his hand, his fingers were like ice. Natasha looked down at them and saw they were black to the second knuckle. Her expression must have given away her surprise.

“Frostbite,” Shostakov identified with a chuckle that was far from mirthful. “It will heal. Come, both of you. This way. No sense wasting time.”

Natasha knew better than to correct him that dead flesh did not heal. She followed Shostakov and the soldier out into the hall, and then into the old training room. It was empty. There were no more sisters.

“Here we are,” Shostakov declared. He talked, Natasha realized, like he was speaking with frayed patience to very small children. He indicated the sparring ring at the center of the room. “Get situated. Let’s see what we’re working with. Let’s try it bare-handed for now.”

She did as she was told, rolling her neck and loosening her shoulders along the way. There was no denying the heart racing in her ears, but fear was only ever to be listened to and never indulged. Her teacher settled into stance opposite her. Until this point he had been walking as if on puppet strings, but with a soft wave and a call of “whenever you’re ready,” from Shostakov, all that changed. He exhaled and rolled his mechanical shoulder, twitched every one of his fingers, clenched and unclenched his fist. He looked almost at ease while his eyes calmly catalogued his opponent head to toe. Natasha realized he was waiting. Off in the corner, Shostakov was waiting, too. For a split second she met his eye and the look on his face made her skin crawl.

She returned her attention to her teacher. He was watching her not unlike a cat surveying a cornered mouse. Natasha forced herself to exhale and let her thoughts sink into the undercurrent so her body could move unimpeded. She took a step forward.

Whatever happened after that happened too quickly for most people in the room to follow. He aimed a kick at her head, she twisted out of the way, caught a fist, attempted to swing up onto his shoulder but ended up darting out of the way of a second punch instead. She landed in a crouch and pounced at him again to block a third. He was fast. It was all she could do just to avoid getting hit, and even that was not enough.

She didn’t see the blow coming. It blindsided her from the right when her arm was pinned, but even so she might not have had time to react. The metal connected with her head with a sickening crunch that seemed much too loud for her ears, and suddenly she felt more than saw the floor coming up to meet her on the other side as her vision turned to stars. It was a moment before the buzz in her ears cleared enough for her to hear Shostakov shouting, and a few more before she could make out the words.

“—in your empty fucking head that lethal force was not authorized?!” He sounded livid. “Do you have any idea the kind of investment she represents? For fuck’s sake _restrain him_ already. How hard could it be? Put a muzzle on him if you have to. And somebody clean this bitch up, I don’t need her bleeding all ov—”

Somebody was trying to pull Natasha up by her shoulders, but her head felt too heavy. She just managed to crack her eyes open. There were a lot more people in the room than the last time she checked. Where had they all come from? For a moment the pain was so much she was certain she was going to be sick. The room spun threateningly.

The rest faded into static and haze. None the less, Natasha still remembers very clearly wondering in that moment why on earth she was putting herself through this ordeal. This was very unusual. She had never before asked herself why. She had never thought to. It had been programmed into her to never question orders, and so she never did.

Years after the fact, she would come up with a name for what had happened to her that day: cognitive recalibration. For all that he would teach her in the years to come, the most important thing the Winter Soldier had to offer her had already been given. If not for one misunderstood instruction, the Black Widow would to this day be an agent of the Russian government. Instead, she had been granted both the greatest gift and the greatest burden a human being could bear, and although it would be years before her will was truly her own, she now had the means to bring it into her grasp.

And so it came to be, when fifty years later Natasha Romanoff recognized her old teacher’s handiwork in a HYDRA base beneath a Portland travel office, she realized it was time she returned the favor. Even if all signs pointed to her name being scrawled on his hit list, she surely owed him this for what they must have done to him because of her. It could mean the death of her, she knew, but it was a better death than simply letting herself be found.

Natasha left everything as she found it but for the list she had edited in the most obvious way she could. Already, the plan was forming in her mind. She did not think Steve capable of finding the Winter Soldier when he did not want to be found, but he was always close to the trail even if he could not see it. If this mission proved to be her last, she trusted no one more to finish it in her place.

On her way out the door, she made travel arrangements and called in a favor with an old friend.

 


	3. -

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Natasha makes a gamble and progress is made on all fronts.

There was a warehouse just outside Vancouver where a national grocery chain housed their butchered meat for distribution, though this particular morning found it lashed top to bottom in police tape. A number of emergency responder vehicles were parked flashing around back, and a young woman with blonde dreadlocks stood on tiptoes across the street clutching a vintage camera.

“They’re going to cover up the truth on this one,” she told the dark-haired woman next to her as she frantically snapped pictures of a body bag being loaded into the back of an ambulance. “Again! Trying to protect the meat packing industry, those murderers.” The older of the two glanced down at the young woman’s shirt, which proclaimed in large red letters that, _Meat is Murder, Dairy is Rape._

“This is what happens when you’re exposed too long to the chemicals they lace all our food with nowadays,” she continued. “But of course the media will probably say it was just an industrial accident. Ha! Brainwashed sheeple. Here,” she added, fishing a pamphlet out of her messenger bag. “Educate yourself.”

The dark-haired woman reached for the paper, but it slipped between her fingers and fluttered to the ground. Both women stooped down to pick it in the same second. Elbows knocked.

“I’m so sorry!” the older exclaimed as the camera crashed down onto the pavement. It bounced with a loud crack and split open, sending the film rolling out into the sunlight.

“I am so, so sorry,” she continued over the anguished cry of its owner. “I didn’t mean—”

“My evidence!” the poor girl sobbed. The camera, for what it was worth, appeared to be undamaged. Good old 1980s manufacturing.

“Please let me make this up to you,” Natasha Romanoff insisted. She reached into her bag and pulled out a small spiral notebook she kept just for such occasions. She smiled nervously. “I— I write for the Courier, you know. I might be able to get in a piece. It’s the least I can do, if you have the time.”

The activist’s face lit up.

* * *

Two and a half hours and two over-priced cups of organic Free Trade tea later, Natasha settled on a park bench with all her loose ends securely tied and more information than she would have been able to glean from yet another room of dead bodies. The murders were fresh this time, three days old at most, and there was evidence of corporate interest in keeping the whole thing hushed up. She was close.

Natasha sat back and casually scanned her surroundings like she was waiting to meet someone before pulling up her phone as if to text them. Instead, she brought up the map she had complied of known HYDRA facilities. There were quite a number in the country, but as Canada had been little more than political backwater for the majority of the 20th century, few had ever been called upon to house the Winter Soldier. Even the Vancouver base was likely just a pitstop between the Bering Strait and America proper. The same went for the only other dot on the map, a single storage facility on the coast of Alaska. Natasha eyed the pin flag that marked it, then scrolled lower. Three Winter Soldier bases in South America. He’d been heading more or less north since Texas, so he had probably passed on them in favor of crossing the Strait into Siberia. North he went, so north she would follow. Just like old times.

Curled in an overnight bus out of Anchorage, Alaska several nights later, Natasha ran the scenarios in her head. It was a dangerous game she had dared to play, and it too evident as of late that her heart was just as much a player in it as her head was. After all, her head would have steered her along the path of her original mission.

“Steve would disapprove,” she had told Fury when he had assigned it to her.

“No shit,” he had replied. “If you have a better idea, I’d love to hear it.”

She didn’t, and yet here she was, disobeying orders. Not that Nick would be surprised. She had half a mind to wonder if he had intended for it to go this way from the start; S.H.I.E.L.D. didn’t exactly lack for precedence when it came to recruiting old enemies to their cause.

Steve, for what it was worth, would probably be more approving of the current course, and in the grand scheme of things Natasha could be reasonably certain that meant she was doing the right thing. Her contact had assured her she had passed on the message, and if she was right, the Captain couldn’t be more than a day or two behind her. Yet as she drew closer to her own target, she felt more and more reluctant to let him catch up. A part of her knew why.

Natasha sunk lower into her seat and tried to find sleep that wouldn’t come.

* * *

From the bus stop it was a taxi ride out into the nature reserve, and several hour’s hike in the Alaskan wilderness. The snow was not so thick this time of year, and although the wind had a bite to it, the weather was quite nice. It had been a long time since Natasha had just walked through the unsettled wild like this—just her, and her thoughts, and her gun.

She found his footprints only by virtue of knowing his tricks; they were hers too, afterall, though even she had to admit he had a gift for reading the landscape that she could likely never match. Still, she found him and she followed, making no effort to conceal her tracks.

The old shack still stood somehow, braced against arctic ocean winds for what must surely be a century now. It looked abandoned for all intents and purposes, though around back the padlock which had kept the cellar locked all these years had been wrenched clean off.

Making certain her weapons were within reach, Natasha descended the familiar steps. She was not surprised to find the shack’s caretaker bled out at the bottom, but when she checked for a pulse that wasn’t there, she found him warm.

She drew her gun.

This particular outpost had one purpose and one purpose only: to serve as illegal transport across the Bering Strait. Natasha herself had passed through perhaps a dozen times. She had taken tea with the dead man at the bottom of the steps. Her was a nice fellow; he took care of the boats and didn’t ask questions. While the shack at the surface served as his cover, it was the cellar that had been converted into his real living space, as well as storage for supplies and boarding for the agents that passed through this way. It stretched a ways down into the cliffside, before ending in a hidden dock somewhere below.

Natasha’s pulse pounded in her ears as she crept through the abandoned facility. She opened door after door, each leading to yet another room lying empty and untouched. The first sign of a break-in didn’t come until a floor below, where a pinpad had been pulled from the wall to grant access to a weapons storage area. Beyond was a small room with enough ammunition to stock a small army, and beyond that a room built around a piece of hardware Natasha hadn’t seen intact in decades.

Every destroyed base so far had been equipped to hold the Winter Soldier—to sedate him, to wipe him, to freeze him—and here was no exception. Yet every base so far, without fail, had had the technology for doing so gutted down and eviscerated until it was little more than a mound of twisted metal in a desert of torn wire and shattered bulbs.

Here it sat untouched in the center of the room. Natasha took a step closer. The motion activated the lights around it, and she was suddenly too cognizant of every inch of space around her that wouldn’t fit into her line of sight. She was aware of her breath and her heart and her finger on the trigger. She could practically feel another presence in the room with her, even if she could not see it or hear it or touch it.

She passed through the second doorway, lightning quick to check the corners and find them empty. The room was clear. She was alone. Still, the hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. The silence was palpable. The air was stagnant.

“Natalia,” he said.

Natasha whirled on the spot. He stood in the doorway as if he had always been standing there, looking—if possible—even worse for wear than the last time she had seen him in DC. One of the plates from his upper arm was missing, but that was hardly the worst of it. His hair hung limp and dirty, but he must have washed his face at one point because the grime had been pushed up to his hairline, framing his already gaunt face. The circles under his eyes were darker, too, and the hair on his sunken cheeks was patchy like he had tried to trim it hastily several days ago. Still, it was him. And he knew her by name.

A semi-automatic hung at his side. Natasha did not lower her gun.

“Why have you been following me?” he asked. His voice was flat and even, if a little raspy with disuse. He was in no hurry.

Natasha let herself crack a wry smile. “James,” she said. “It’s been a while.”

“I won’t ask twice.”

“I’m just here to talk,” she assured him, straight faced, and turned her gun to show him that her finger was not on the trigger before slowly, slowly placing it at the ground by her feet. Nobody relaxed. “It’s come to my attention that we have a common interest in taking down HYDRA.”

“I’m not interested in joining what remains of your organization,” he said before she could elaborate. “This is for me. I’m doing this alone.”

“You misunderstand,” Natasha replied, voice calm as a frozen brook. “I’m not here under anyone’s orders. I sought you out on my own. See, you’re not the only one with a bone to pick with your former masters.”

“I’m doing this alone,” he repeated.

“But you don’t have to,” she insisted.

“I do, I am, and I will.” He straightened up as he said this, and Natasha recognized in his tone that spark of stubborn defiance that a long line of men had doubtless tried to smother out of him as they had tried to smother it out in her.

“Then I will follow,” she retorted.

“No, you won’t.”

“You intend to take the Red Room first, don’t you?” she guessed, and by the look in his eye she was right. “Cut off the head before you deal with the roots? That’s the plan, isn’t it?”

He furrowed his brows and said nothing.

“But not even you can just waltz in there on your own,” she continued. “And even if you could, I’m not about to sit idly by while you have all the fun without me. It’ll be like old times.”

His eyes narrowed further. She could practically see the gears turning in his head.

“One agent in the right place at the right time...” he began.

“There is precedent for two.”

“ _One was found to be more efficient,_ ” he said through his teeth, for the first time in Russian. Natasha recognized it as a direct quote.

“That’s their philosophy,” She replied. “It doesn’t have to be yours.”

This was clearly the wrong thing to say. His hand darted for something on his belt. Natasha’s body moved before her mind could even quite process the weapon he had drawn. She scooped her gun off the floor as she darted to the side. The bullets hit the ground far enough behind her that she was sure they were meant as a warning, and she accepted the risk of that assumption when she rolled into a crouch and pointed her gun at him without firing back.

“My philosophy is my own,” he said with venom she hadn’t quite expected, and although his gun—a small pistol from his hip holster—remained pointed at her, he didn’t fire either. “Not theirs, and certainly not yours. I’ll do it on my own or I will find a way, and if you won’t take no for an answer I’ll make you.”

Natasha had but a split second to consider her options while adrenaline roared through her ears. She didn’t have very many. In fact, she really only had one.

She tilted her chin up at him. Her smile was a dare.

“Make me then,” she said.

He stared at her. For three whole heartbeats nothing happened, and then they both moved at once.

 


	4. [ RED ]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Natasha gets creative.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Forgive my writing slump, I don't know what's up.

Lessons were held every other day, with time off for missions. The routine was the same every time. The Winter Soldier would arrive, escorted by four to six men. The men were always armed. They were just there to watch, Shostakov had said early on before he had stopped coming, but Natasha wasn’t fooled.

When everyone was stationed, Winter Soldier would explain the lesson. He sounded stiff when he spoke, like he was reading off a script suspended somewhere in the vicinity over Natasha’s left shoulder. The first time she heard his voice, Natasha was surprised at the accent, but there was no one to ask why, or why the enemy was being trusted to teach her. Part of the reason, she would soon find, was that he was exceptional at what he did.

When he was finished, he would order her to demonstrate what she knew. Natasha had thought herself lethal—her record would agree—but one of the first things she learned was just how much she didn’t yet know. Her specialities lay in secrets and manipulation, after all, with close quarters combat more of an occasional necessity. Consequently, she quickly discovered that during these demonstrations there was no point in holding back. Whatever she threw at him he would best once, twice, sometimes five times before calling her off.

Then, and only then, did he explain. At first, he was stiff about this part of it, too. He would stop and look around as if expecting someone to tell him what to say, but Shostakov (when he was there) would just nod at him without smiling to go on. The armed men certainly never responded. Instead, he would be forced to turn back to Natasha, looking—for all the world, scared—and begin.

Over time, the words did fall easier from his mouth. It was a subtle change, so much so that Natasha wasn’t sure if any of the others even noticed at first. It started with him just looking at her when he talked. Eventually, long after Shostakov stopped coming, there might even be a flicker of something in his eye when she got something right. “Like that, exactly,” he would say, and it wasn’t a smile but it was—she didn’t know what to call it. Like his eyes came into focus. Like he was _there_ there, when normally he was not.

A few more weeks, and he stopped returning to attention to speak at all. Instead he would just call it, and she was forced to adapt on the spot.

“You’re small,” he grunted one day as he swung up for a kick. Natasha dropped down to avoid it and immediately darted for an opening that closed before she could reach it. “And fast.” He punted her back. “But you need to make yourself smaller and faster.”

“How?” she called through gritted teeth as she swiped for his ankles. She hit one, but the other twisted away in the knick of time.

“Don’t ever let yourself stop moving,” he replied with a punch that ended in the air where her head had been half a second before she rolled out of the way and back to her feet. “Twist, spin—they can’t hit you if they can’t catch you, and if they try, use their weight against them. If you’re not strong enough to force an opening, trick them into one.”

When the next punch came, Natasha did as she was told. She spun and caught it under her arm, then immediately threw her free elbow back to where she knew his head would be. He blocked it, but she used the leverage to hook her leg around his and twist onto his back. Getting a chokehold was easy; keeping it was hard. Next thing she knew was weightless in the air above him. She didn’t even have time to land with any sort of grace short of the dull thump of her back hitting the mat. His face leaning over blocked the glare from the overhead lights.

“Better, but you stopped moving,” he told her in a way that might almost be described as smug. At least he sounded out of breath. “If you stop, it’s an invitation for your partner to go. Haven’t you ever been dancing?”

“No,” she frowned as she accepted his grip to help her to her feet. “Have you?”

At this, he hesitated. His eyes momentarily slipped out of focus to a spot on the wall behind her, but whatever thought pulled him away seemed to slip through his fingers like oil through water. He still looked distracted when he blinked back to matters at hand, and more than a little discontent.

“No,” he decided absently. His eyes were back to that dead state they often assumed when he was made to stand at attention.

“You sure?” she pressed, now suddenly deathly curious.

“Yes,” he replied gruffly, and it would be the last word she would be able to get out of him that day. She knew better than to ever press the issue again, but that didn’t equate to her forgetting about it. Curiosity was a funny thing in that regard; squelching it only fanned the flames.

It wasn’t that Natasha had never been around men much. She had—on missions at least. She knew how they looked at her since she was fourteen, and more importantly she knew how to use it against them. But he was different. He didn’t look at her from the legs up the way strangers did, nor like she was something suddenly dangerous, and he definitely didn’t look at her the way her handlers would, like she was a gun or a machine part in need of regular inspection. The most unsettling part was that she didn’t have an analogue for what his look meant when it wasn’t an empty, dead stare, and she had nothing in any of her training that told her what to think of that. She spent a lot of time ruminating on it and still had no answers.

In the end, she was only certain of one thing. Despite the way he walked and talked like some kind of wind-up soldier, there was something organic caged underneath all the cogs and springs and machinery. At first, Natasha had pitied this, but as she spent more time studying his movements—and he hers—the more she came to realize that he might not be the only one so afflicted. She had always considered herself fully conscious, but there were moments when he would circle around and adjust her stance here or her hold on a weapon there and her chest was suddenly too tight to breathe properly. Her heart would hammer so loudly she was afraid he might hear, and as petrified she was of herself in those moments, they would make her forget entirely about the training, and the armed guards, and the Red Room, and even the war she had spent her life preparing for. The world became very small—just the two of them—and as alien as life was without orders, it was exhilarating too. A small, fluttering part of her wanted it to be that way always.

But those were daydreams, and daydreams were for children. Natasha was no child, and never had been. In another lifetime, she might have pined after the impulse to strip the both of them of their reservations and swallow the world whole in their freedom, but hers was the life of a spy and a killer, and layers of falsehoods were the armor they carried as a cost.

Instead, the best she could settle for was aiming to beat the man in a fight.

It would certainly prove a challenge. Despite looking no older than herself, he fought with reflexes Natasha had only seen in men with decades of combat experience, and to complicate matters, her usual tricks were far less effective against an opponent who proved himself more or less ambidextrous. Still, let it never be said that Natasha Romanoff would settle for anything less than being any man’s equal. Twist and spin, he had said. Trick and opening.

She watched, and she thought.

The answer to her conundrum, it just so happened, came to her on a mission. The status of the operation was less than ideal; the enemy bunker was flooding, there was a bullet buried in Natasha’s thigh, and there were at least half a dozen men in pursuit. As luck would have it, she rounded a corner and immediately noticed one of the walls had started to crumble. Beyond was a mass of sparking wires which she paid no mind to at the time, hurling a miniature explosive into the hole and hurrying for the nearest stairwell. To her great fortune, she had only just made it up a step or two when the device blew. To its credit and her miscalculation, the wall continued to hold, but the live wires, now freed, sagged into the water accumulating below. The pursuers, just seconds behind, convulsed and collapsed to the floor.

Natasha fled with her life and an idea. She called them with Widow’s Bite. In retrospect they were very rudimentary—just two metal washers, some wiring she’d been able to lift from the light in her room, and what she could gut from her radio. With a bit of creativity and experimentation, she was able to mount a piece of the radio onto the inside of an old bracelet, where at the press of a button a very simple signal would short the radio’s batteries on the metal discs. If they were close enough together at the time, a current would briefly jump between them. As for placing them, a little sweet talk and a bat of her eyelashes granted Natasha permission to return back from an operation with a stick of gum in her pocket. It wasn’t the most advanced tech in the world, but for one use it didn’t have to be.

She assembled her creation under cover of darkness, behind the shower curtain in her bathroom. An initial test fried both batteries instantly, knocked Natasha out cold for what must have been a solid minute, and shorted every electronic she had on her at the time, which luckily only consisted of a watch.

She guiltily stashed the watch under her mattress with plans to dispose of it on her next mission. Asking for new batteries for her radio was also relatively easy, though she doubted that doing so a second time would go unnoticed by those who might suspect she was up to. Untimately Natasha had no choice but to make what modifications she could and let fate take on the rest. When the morning finally dawned, she tucked the disks into her belt, softened the gum in her mouth, and reported to the training room at the usual hour.

She did well to hide the gum under her tongue in two pieces before venturing out, because it only took her a split second to realize that something was off when she arrived in the usual training room. There was an extra person in the room today. Natasha’s blood ran cold with recognition.

“My meeting ended early today,” Shostakov said with a lying smile. “I just wanted to stop in and see your progress, my dear.”

“Thank you, sir,” Natasha replied stiffly. “I hope I do not disappoint.”

She cursed herself as she walked into the sparring circle. There was no way they would let her bring gum in a second time, and this was the only piece. By the next sparring lesson it would be dry and useless, especially if she had to keep it in her mouth for the next five hours. She couldn’t very well back out now.

Then again, just the thought of the things Shostakov and his men might do to her if she put a toe out of line make her quake. One must never mess with the plans the Red Room makes on one’s behalf. Never. Never. Death would be kinder. The entire stupidity of her plan caught up with her like a tidal wave.

The Winter Soldier was talking and Natasha was only half-listening. His voice sounded emptier today than it had in weeks, and his shoulders were pressed tightly back. Natasha pointedly refused to look at Shostakov lounging back in a lone chair by the wall, but she saw the Winter Soldier’s eyes dart to him every few seconds as he talked. Her palms were slick like they hadn’t been since her first time out in the field, and there was a black mist descending over her mind, ethereal as a ghost but constricting as a viper. One misstep, and it promised vengeance. Natasha tried to swallow but her mouth was too dry. Snippets of memory shuddered about in her mind of the things they could do with their needles and knives to assets who misbehaved. She shut them out and willed the color to return to her face.

Instead, in the silences between, she found a curious little voice. It was quiet and wavering and delicate as a butterfly’s wings.

 _This is your chance_ , it seemed to urge. _You’ve worked for this._

It took no effort to push it aside. Her opponent had finished speaking and assumed a defensive position. Natasha mirrored him.

She moved first. She used what she knew. Moving, moving—but he was faster. Her back hit the mat with an angry clap and Shostakov checked his watch.

Round two. She got up. She brushed herself off. She moved. Dodge. Dodge. Twist. Spin. Miss. Dodge. Miss, miss, miss.

Fall. It’s as if he had been holding back on her her during their sessions. Shostakov was whispering something into a guard’s ear. He wasn’t happy. Natasha bit her lip.

 _This is your chance_ , the voice called again.

Natasha took a deep breath. Round three. She tested her fingers. Wherever the man who usually taught her was, he wasn’t in front of her. His mind had gone off elsewhere. This shell was empty; this shell was dead. This fact angered her, but there was no time to identify why.

_This is your chance._

This was her chance.

Natasha moved. She slid under his first punch and straight between his legs, pulling the first disk from her pocket in one swift motion. Before he had a chance to round on her, she kissed the invention to her lips to plant the adhesive and turned to face him. There was no longer an opening for a hit, but she didn’t need one. All she did was slap the disk onto a metal shoulder blade.

Before he could register what happened, she dropped out of the way of the next hit and rolled from the one that followed. From her crouch she darted forward again. She aimed for his left, and he didn’t disappoint. She took the block as it came, leaving a second disk behind on the back of his forearm, and leaped to the side. Her fingers found the button on the inside of her bracelet.

She pressed it. The sparks were instantaneous. It was a short shock, but effective. His arm slumped, and in the instant of gut reaction he had to pull a disk off, she struck for his balance.

The hit would have made it. She had thought it through so perfectly, exactly how she would take him down. Every angle accounted for, all but one.

One of the armed guards knocked her hit out of the way with the butt of his gun, and in the same motion shouldered her back with such force she stumbled. There was another gun at her back to meet her. The encouraging little voice was silent in the face of flashing recollections of knives and needles and blood and bone.

The rest of the armed men were upon the Winter Soldier. To Natasha he looked more confused than anything, but as they nudged him none too gently to create more distance between them, she saw the reactionary anger of a caged animal well up in his eyes. A gun barrel at his eye level quelled him, but it bubbled tense beneath the surface none the less.

Shostakov, meanwhile, strolled into the sparring circle perfectly at ease. He even whistled a little tune as he plucked one of Natasha’s disks off the floor and turned it over in his fingers.

“You are as clever as the files say,” he grinned as he flipped it in the air off his thumb like a coin. Natasha was too aware of the gun still pressed into the back of her neck to be flattered. “I must admit, it is not what I expected.” He flipped it again, this time to the man behind Natasha. He lowered the gun to catch it. “Take that to the boys down in tech, will you? The piece she’s wearing, too.” He nodded for Natasha to remove it and hand it over. “Have them whip up a real prototype.”

Dumbfounded, Natasha did as instructed. The man took the bracelet from her and left, leaving her standing at attention under Shostakov’s unreadable gaze. Behind him, the Winter Soldier had been forced down to his knees. He still clutched his mechanical arm. Other than the five gun barrels pointed down at him, no one offered any help.

“At ease,” Shostakov smiled at her. “It was a test. You passed.”

Natasha desperately wanted to ask what was to happen to her next, but she knew better just as much as she knew she might be better off not knowing. Instead her eyes flickered past Shostakov again. This time, he followed her gaze.

“Don’t worry about him,” he shrugged. “Whatever damage a little girl can do with paperclips and chewing gum, an enemy spy can do tenfold. We’ll fix whatever you did and make sure it never happens again. As for you...” He smiled. Natasha swallowed. “...consider yourself graduated to phase two.”

She didn’t dare move.

“It’s a good thing,” he clarified cheerfully. “It means we are progressing well ahead of schedule. Come.” He took her by the shoulder and let her from the room. “Let’s take you to the briefing room.”

She allowed herself to be led out, but not before casting one last glance over her shoulder at the men left in the room.

Not one looked back.

 


	5. -

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Sam and Steve catch up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Why does dialogue have to be so _hard_?

Sam scratched his head and double-checked their coordinates. “I mean,” he rotated the map on his phone, zoomed in more. “We’re in the right place...” he confirmed with a shrug, but any scrap of sense would say otherwise.

After the lengths that HYDRA had gone through to hide their other bases, the shack on the seacliff was anti-climactic to say the least. Not only was the door not locked, there was not even a lock to speak of. Steve had been able to gently nudge the door open with no trouble, revealing beyond an empty, one-room house that looked like it hadn’t been occupied in years.

“Then there must be a hidden door around here,” Steve insisted, although looking around, it was clear that there was no space for any secret rooms, not even for a mouse. It was a shack in the surest sense, the outside world visible through every crack in every wall.

“You don’t think they doubled back and went south, do you?” Sam asked cautiously. They had gotten lucky on the trip up; hitchhiking had saved them about a day, but if they had been wrong to come this far, it still meant almost three days travelling in the wrong direction.

Steve pursed his lips. “We can’t afford to jump to that conclusion right away,” he said. “Let’s keep looking.”

He returned to thumbing through the few belongings scattered about. Other than the trappings of some lonesome hermit, nothing stuck out. It was as if whoever had lived here once simply walked out one day and never returned. A brief spark of hope came when Steve noticed a light switch on the wall, but when he flicked it, rather than opening any secret hatch, the switch merely turned on the lone lamp on the bedside table. The light wavered and flickered, but did not go out.

“How does a place all the way out here even have electricity?” He wondered aloud.

“Maybe there’s a generator out back?” Sam guessed. “I’d like to get a second look at this place from the outside anyway. There must be more to it that we’re not seeing.”

Not surprisingly, he turned out to be right. There was no generator, but there were a set of doors leading to a cellar. Unlike the rest of the house, these _did_ have a lock, or had one some time recently. It had been well-taken care of and free of rust before someone had taken the liberty of ripping it clean off.

Inside, down a short flight of stairs, were more flickering lights and what proved to be a corpse. It was a small relief to find as they drew closer that it was no one they knew.

“It’s recent,” Sam noted after prodding it with the barrel of his gun. Rigor mortis had not even begun to set in. “Three or four hours, tops.”

“Shh,” Steve said suddenly. “You hear that?”

Sam paused to listen. If he strained, he could just hear the wind and sea. “No?” he began, but before he could ask what he should be hearing, Steve launched down a hallway with his shield raised at the ready. Sam had to practically jog to keep up. It wasn’t until they descended down a flight of stairs that he heard it too. It was a mechanical whirring sound not unlike an overheated computer. It groaned like something very large from down a long, empty hall, lined at interval with dimly wavering lights. Whatever was making this noise, there was no doubt it needed a lot of power—power this facility could just barely give it.

Sam fell into a soldier’s mindset at once. Alarm bells in his head warned him to turn back. There was danger here, but not one he could identify and so not one he could prepare himself for. He drew his gun as he and Steve started past a series of closed doors. The noise grew louder as they drew closer, now accompanied by the hiss and crackle of electricity.

Near the end of the hall, they came upon the one door that stood open. Steve thrust out his arm to tell Sam to hold back, and pressing himself against the wall, peeked around the corner from behind his shield. Whatever he saw there, it send him forward at a run with a wave of his hand for Sam to follow, which he did without hesitation.

It was only once he had passed the threshold that he finally saw the source of the mechanical revving.

“Oh my god,” Sam breathed at the sight of it.

It was a machine alright, not unlike a dentist’s chair but far more sinister, and with far more restraints. It would have looked convincingly like a torture device on its own without the bone-chilling addition of someone being strapped into it—and they were strapped, at ankles and wrists, thighs and upper arms, lashed in with metal and leather enough to contain a grizzly bear. With the only light coming from the sparking plates overtop of it, it was hard to tell who exactly it was, but they remained motionless and limp even as the two men ran into the room and set off the overhead lights. Only then did two things become simultaneously apparent.

One, the sparking plates were doing no harm. Something or someone had bent and twisted that part of the machine well out of the way of doing anything but making the occupant’s shoulder-length hair stand slightly on end. Two, the occupant was breathing, and for the first time, wore a familiar face.

“Natasha!” Steve called, but she did not respond. Eyes closed and head lulled to the side, she might have been sleeping if it wasn’t for the angry red bump on the side of her head. Steve gave her shoulder a shake. “Natasha!”

For a moment, Sam forgot how to breathe. Then Natasha squinted, groaned, and finally cracked open her eyes.

“Steve?” she croaked. She tried to lift her hand, perhaps to touch what must be the source of a splitting headache, but the chair’s restraints dug in and prevented even the slightest movement. What little color she had drained from her face. Somehow, she still managed to force a smile. “Mind giving a girl a hand?” she asked, wiggling her fingers.

Sam took one look at the thick steel keeping her in place and went straight for the machine controls. Steve attempted to pry the bracers off by hand regardless.

“Are you alright?” he asked between attempts to make the metal budge to no avail. “What happened?”

“Don’t bother,” Natasha told him, referring to his wasted efforts just as Sam found the right switch to move what even super-serum couldn’t.The second she was freed, Natasha pushed herself out of the chair so quickly she swayed and may have even fallen had Steve not been there to steady her. Even so, she did not hesitate to back three or four paces away from the thing as if it might swallow her back up again.

“What’s going on?” Steve continued.

Natasha took several deep breaths. “You’ll have to be more specific,” she said as she gingerly prodded the bump on her head and pulled back her fingers to check for blood. Behind Steve, Sam tried a few more useless switches to turn the machine off before simply kicking the plugs out of the wall. The chair sighed into silence and all the lights grew a little brighter.

Steve’s brow furrowed. He took a step Natasha squinting under the new light. “Did Bucky,” he pointed an accusatory finger behind him at the machine, “Did he—do _that_ to you?”

Natasha’s eyes flicked up at and down, studying Steve’s strung posture as she considered her answer, or perhaps the intricacies of his question.

“Yes,” she decided.

Steve looked like someone had just slapped him.

“What does it do?” Sam asked.

“Transcranial stimulation of the medial temporal lobe,” she told him. When both men returned the same quizzical look, she clarified. “Memory interference. Just slightly more sophisticated than cutting open your skull and going in with an eggbeater.”

“Is this is what they used to—to...” Steve rounded on the machine with a look of vicious loathing unlike anything Natasha had ever seen on him. “And he—”

“He didn’t want me to follow,” Natasha finished for him. “That’s _all_. He could have just as easily killed me,” she added quietly. “But, he didn’t. That’s good news fo—”

“Why did you go after him alone?” He rounded and closed the distance between them in two large strides, suddenly looming over her and using every inch of his height to cast her in his shadow and pin her with his gaze. She met his glare unshrinkingly. “How long have you been tracking him without telling me? Why didn’t you say you knew him?”

“Woah there,” Sam interrupted, careful to place and hand on Steve’s shoulder and wedge himself in between them. “I think everyone needs to just step back a second and take a deep breath.”

“No time for that,” Natasha told him. She turned for the door. “We need to get moving.”

“No,” Steve grabbed her by the arm. “Answer the question.”

“I will,” she promised as she yanked her arm back. “On the way.”

Steve let her go and stormed along behind her as she slipped from the room. Sam sighed to the heavens and followed.

“Start talking,” Steve ordered when they turned back down the hallway from which they had come.

“What would you like answered first?” she asked. Although her pace was brisk, Sam noticed she walked with a slight limp.

“Why did you wait so long to tell Sam and I what you were doing?”

“I’m not obliged to tell you all the details of my life,” she replied as close to bitterly as Natasha could sound in casual conversation.

“You knew we were looking,” Steve retorted. It sounded like an accusation.

“I knew you’d never find him,” she said. “Believe me, I spent five years looking for a paper trail. He doesn’t leave one.” She shrugged. “Call it a lifestyle.”

“You found him this time,” Steve shot back.

“I got lucky on another assignment.”

“You expect me to believe that?”

“Yes.” She threw a glance over her shoulder as if daring him to call otherwise. “Because it’s the truth, believe it or not. Anyway, Fury asked me to keep an eye on his whereabouts and how close you two were to catching him.”

“Fury was on on this too?!” It was unclear if Steve sounded angry or betrayed.

“Hold that thought,” Sam butt in as they reached the stairs and Natasha started downward instead up back toward the surface. “Aren’t we going the wrong way?”

Natasha shot him a mischievous smile. “We’re going sailing,” she said. Sam didn’t need to ask further. The possibility of this road trip leading into Siberia had been an increasingly probable one since the wild goosechase for Natasha had started.

So down they went. Down and down and down.

“I’m still waiting to hear how you plan to justify keeping Sam and me running in circles all these months,” Steve continued after a few flights.

“Under the circumstances, finding him wasn’t pertinent,” Natasha brushed off. “We all had bigger problems to deal with in the wake of SHIELD falling.”

“It sure seems pertinent to you now,” Steve growled back, who had never been a fan of simply putting friends on the backburner even if there were larger problems at hand.

“Well,” Natasha shrugged. “Circumstances change.”

“And you didn’t think the circumstances four months ago called for you letting any of us know that you and Bucky knew each other?”

“If I _knew_ four months ago that he and I knew each other, maybe I would have said something,” she replied coldly.

Steve hesitated on the step a moment before following. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.

Natasha seemed thoughtful for a minute before finally answering, very quietly, “it means that your friend isn’t the only one that’s been busy piecing fragmented memories together,” she said.

This, at last, shut Steve up.

Still the steps continued downward. They had stopped passing floors ages ago, now seemingly trapped in an endless downward spiral as the sea grew louder and the air sharper with salt and something else.

“Does anybody else smell smoke?” Sam asked.

“Oh no,” Natasha breathed.

Down and down, and down and down. The smoke grew thicker. Sleeves pressed to faces, the three of them drove on until at long last they reached a warped metal door flung open into a cave mouth filled with the smoking embers of a small dock and half a dozen wooden boats.

“Like I said,” Natasha sighed in defeat. “He doesn’t want to be followed.”

“So what now? We swim?” Sam asked, and the immediately realizing his mistake turned to Steve. “Sorry, I didn’t mean—”

Steve raised a hand. “None taken. Nobody’s swimming. We’ll just have to find another way across, but quickly.” He turned to Natasha. “How much time do you reckon we have before we lose the trail?”

Natasha was already dialing something into her phone. She raised it to her ear, but covered the mouthpiece to reply, “two weeks,” before turning away.

“Two weeks?” Steve sounded skeptical. “He could be half-way across the continent in two weeks.”

“That’s the idea,” Natasha smiled over her shoulder before turning away again. Her tone softened significantly. “Pepper, it’s me. I’m going to need to call in that favor” Sam and Steve exchanged surprised glances. “Nothing huge. Do you still have that jet Tony got you for your birthday three years ago?... Alaska to Moscow... Do you really want the answer to that question?... Great. Perfect. We’ll be there... Oh, I’m not sure.” Natasha put her hand over the receiver again and turned back to the boys. “Have either of you met Pepper Potts?”

“Like, _the_ Pepper Potts?” Sam asked. Steve just shook his head. Natasha turned back to her phone call.

“No, you haven’t,” she replied. “But if you can trust anyone it’s Steve Rogers and Sam Wilson, I assure you... Of course. Talk to you soon.” She hung up.

“Were you just on the phone Pepper Potts?” Sam asked, dumbfounded. “Like Stark Industries Pepper Potts?”

“I’m allowed to have friends,” Natasha answered lightly as she strolled past. “Shall we? There’s an elevator we can take back up to the surface.”

“Pepper Potts,” Sam repeated again. “How does an international spy make friends with Tony Stark’s—wait, don’t answer that. I don’t want to know.”

“Is it really safe?” Steve gestured back to the cave mouth. “Meeting Bucky on the other side, I mean. Two weeks is long time.”

“Two weeks is how long it takes a train to reach Moscow from eastern Siberia,” she explained. “It’s the fastest and most reliable way, but if he realizes we got on with him, he might look for an alternate route and then we’d lose him for good. We’re better off just meeting him when he arrives. I doubt he’ll expect it.”

This at least proved satisfactory. Steve exchanged a look with Sam in which they both silently agreed to follow Natasha on this one, though in reality it seemed they had little choice on the matter. She had been right about one thing; neither was equipped to find Bucky without her help.

Fifteen hours on a plane. Two more weeks of waiting. Steve glanced over his shoulder before getting into the elevator. It was going to be a long wait.

* * *

Not surprisingly, he had a hard time of falling asleep. He nodded off briefly on the way to the airport, but once he was in the air all rest eluded him. Four hours after Sam and Natasha both managed to pass out in their seats, he had tried to read, managed to watch his way through the first twenty minutes of two of the inflight movies, and had even declined a sleeping pill from the flight attendant on the logic that even given the whole bottle, he wasn’t likely to feel a thing. In a final moment of desperation, he even began to skim through the laminated pamphlet of emergency protocols before the emergency water landing section burned up the last of his patience and he thrust it back into its pocket, checked to make sure the cabin was empty but for his sleeping friends, and stood to pace and stretch his legs.

The trouble with being a national icon was that one wasn’t generally allowed to look worried. It was no exaggeration to say that in times of distress, the whole world looked to him to stand as an example—to know what he was doing, to have a plan, to make it look effortless—but the simple truth of the matter was that faking didn’t always cut it, especially not in times when all he could do was wait. His life was too much like a bicycle; he could balance it all in motion, but if he ever stopped moving it felt like it would crush him and bury him alive.

“He’s returning to himself, you know,” Natasha said quietly when Steve passed her seat for the fifth or sixth time. He stopped where he was and turned to where he was sure she had been sleeping a minute before. She hadn’t moved at all. From the angle at which she held her head, it was possible to see that her head injury had managed to miraculously heal completely in the handful of hours since they had found her. Her eyes were still bleary from sleep, and her voice somewhat raspy. “He’s doing what he’s doing for himself. His words, not mine.”

“You talked to him?” Steve asked, appropriating the empty seat beside Natasha with baited breath.

She shook her head. “Only briefly.”

“How is he?”

At this, Natasha smiled, a rare genuine curl of the corners of her lips. “He knows how to take care of himself, Steve. He’s not a child, even if he’s acting like one.” She sat up a little. “Say, has he always been stubborn, or did he get that one from you?”

Despite himself, Steve breathed a chuckle. “No, that’s all Bucky.” He never thought he’d be so relieved to hear of Bucky being bull-headed. They may have taken a lot from him, but at least they hadn’t taken that. He wanted to ask more, but he couldn’t bring himself to just yet. “Listen, I’ve been meaning to apologize for the way I acted. I shouldn’t have yelled at you the way I did when Sam and I found you. There’s no excuse for it, and I want you know that I’m sorry.”

Natasha nudged her knee to his and gave him a reassuring smile. “You should get some sleep,” she said. It was as much a word of forgiveness coming from her as any.

“That bad?” he chuckled. He had the feeling he must look as much a mess as his nerves felt. “I guess you’re right.” He got to his feet and sighed. Perhaps there was an inkling of sleep stirring behind his eyes if he gave it enough of a chance. “Thank you,” he added.

“For what?”

“Keeping an eye on him.” It wasn’t that Steve wasn’t still at least a little annoyed that Natasha had kept him in the dark, but after having time to think about it, the watchful gaze of the Black Widow were the best hands for Bucky to be in at times like these. He glanced around. “Can I ask you something? You don’t have to answer now, but I’m curious.”

Natasha’s eyes flicked around the empty cabin. Across the isle, Sam appeared to be sleeping soundly. “No harm in trying,” she said. “But no promises.”

“Fair enough,” he conceded, then paused. “How much _do_ you remember? About Bucky. From the sixties, I mean. The files said he was your teacher, wasn’t he?”

“Someone’s been doing his homework,” she smiled, but the smile dimmed and she looked away. “I don’t remember as much as I would like.”

Steve shifted uncomfortably on his feet. “Is it time or did they...” he trailed off.

“Did they what?”

“Take your memories. Like they did Bucky’s.”

“Which do you think?” Natasha said. There was a devilish twinkle in her eye, but the humor was dry and brittle. Before Steve could answer, she stretched and went on. “They don’t take your memories, you know. It’s never that clean. The most they can do is cut them into fragments until there’s no context left—until you’re not even sure if what you’re remembering is really yours or if they stuck it there for you.” Her voice was uncharacteristically hollow. “If you concentrate, you just sort of stumble across images and feelings. It’s possible to piece back together if you have a place to start, but it’s hard.” She went silent, and Steve found he had absolutely nothing to say. “In case you wanted to know what it was like for him,” she finished.

“Thank you for telling me that,” he said at last, certain without her having to say it that she must be speaking from experience. “It means a lot.”

“Don’t mention it,” she shrugged, and then the smile was back. “No really, don’t. If you tell anyone I’ll have to kill you.”

Steve let out a dry bark of a laugh, but by the look she was giving him he couldn’t completely convince himself she was joking.

“Sleep well, Steve,” she added.

“You too,” he replied. It wasn’t until he turned away and started for his seat that he realized that something about the story had indeed made him very tired. The exhaustion of the whole trip must be finally catching up to him.

Natasha waited and listened as he settled back in. She held perfectly still until his breathing evened out at last, fully intent remaining awake, but instead found sleep had crept back for her as well. She let it take her while she had the chance. When she dreamed, she dreamed of Tallinn.

 


	6. [R DE ]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which a mission goes awry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The [file](https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Bxbx0-mKrlAAcGxPanQ2TWdWUkk&authuser=1) in question in the following chapter is, of course, none other than the one Natasha gives Steve at the end of the TWS. I’m mentioning this now because I’d like to point out that there’s no J sound in the Cyrillic alphabet, so “James” is spelled with the closest phonetic approximation: “Dzheyms”. (Zh is pronounced like sh but with more z).
> 
> This is important for exactly the reason you hope it is.

“Phase II,” the man had said as he dropped a thick file onto the metal table. It was labeled Dealing No. 17, among other things. He didn’t give her much of a chance to study it before he flipped it opened and began.

It was not the end of Natasha’s training with the Winter Soldier. Far from it.

“Phase I was a test?” she repeated.

“Well,” the man shrugged. “We had to be sure you were at least as capable as he was. That’s why we _made_ you, isn’t it?”

 _One man, in the right place at the right time, could be better than an army_. Yet, for a reason the man wouldn’t reveal, the Winter Soldier was not, as he put it, “qualified”, to work alone. They normally sent two dozen or so for backup. By the end of Phase Two, the goal was to lower that number. _Two in the right place_ , as it were, would be the next best thing.

And for as much as it baffled Natasha that someone like him would need so many men for backup, it baffled her more how little the team actually did. They spent more time watching the Winter Soldier than they did his targets, which proved to be of no detriment as the man himself was perfectly capable of doing his job without his armed squadron of people who, for the record, Natasha severely doubted were put through the same qualification process she was. Her job as one of their number consisted mainly of hanging back and occasionally taking an order, though it passed from the Winter Soldier down a chain of command such that Natasha never actually got a chance to speak with him.

She could see why there was need for reducing the size of the team.

Still, nothing answered the question of why the Winter Soldier could not simply go alone. He was more than capable, and the one time a mission did go awry, the majority of the team was useless to do anything about it.

It was in Tallinn, in the summer of 1963.

Intel had it that a weapons trade for information was to go down in the old factory on the southern outskirts of the city, but as such an exchange was not in the Soviet’s favor, history once again needed a helping hand. Furthermore, rumor had it that the deal would be conducted between a double agent and higher ups in the local resistance underground. Whether there was truth to the rumor or not didn’t matter; neither man was to leave the building alive.

The Winter Soldier pinpointed the window with the best view of the meeting location within a minute of stepping on site. The others he stationed in the surrounding area and along the ground as auxiliary, and to remove any guards either party brought with them. The factory itself was bugged floor to ceiling, and as night fell the only thing left to do was wait.

As luck would have it, Natasha found herself one of among two others stationed in the primary building along with the Winter Soldier, though a floor above and several rooms over. If, for whatever reason, his shot failed, she had a clearer view of the hallway outside the meeting room to finish the job. In her left ear she was equipped to receive instruction from the rest of the team, and in her right the transmissions from within the meeting room. Orders were not to shoot until there was a visual on the intelligence briefcase which was to be traded for the weapons.

When the parties in question at last arrived, Natasha held still and listened. They did not speak as they passed through the hall where she could see them, but already something was amiss. Neither had so much as a file folder on them.

“How can I be certain that we are safe to speak here?” One of the men said after both had disappeared from Natasha’s view and a soft click told her they had latched the door behind them.

“You worry too much, Sergei,” a second voice chided. “Do you think me one to underestimate my enemies?”

“You will forgive me if I take the same precautions between ourselves,” the first replied stiffly.

The other chuckled. “I pray you do not consider me your enemy, friend. Such a strain on our relationship is bound to make things... difficult.”

His voice shifted from a light banter to an open threat. Intel had assured that all parties had enough riding on the exchange that either would be an idiot to escalate things. Negotiations going south was not in the script.

When events did not go as planned, the Winter Soldier was instructed to kill the target and leave immediately. Natasha braced herself for the gunshot, but none rang out. It could only mean he was waiting for something—perhaps for the two men to kill each other, but that was a high gamble to take. By all rights, he should be calling the operation compromised. The call was only his to make, but the radio waves remained silent. Natasha bit her lip and kept listening.

“I consider you neither enemy nor friend,” the first man was saying. “We have a common interest in this, that is all. My employer wishes to engage no further.”

“Your employer?” the second man suddenly asked, outraged. “I was under the impression that I was speaking to Sergei Alexandrovich.”

“Sergei Alexandrovich sends his apologies that he could not make it tonight,” the first man replied. “He has sent me to negotiate on his behalf.”

“Bullshit!” the second man snapped. There was a rustle on the recording.

“There is no need for your peashooter here, Misha,” the first man said calmly. “I can guarantee you that the man I have stationed on the third floor of the apartments across the plaza will splatter your brains onto this wall here before you can even pull the trigger. Look there, fifth window from the left. Can you see him?”

Natasha froze. Third floor, fifth window from the left was where the Winter Soldier had stationed himself. While it was entirely possible this man was bluffing, if they were both to look at that particular window now they would both surely see the barest hint of a glare from the rifle scope. Natasha readied herself for the shot she was positively certain would now hit at least one of the men squarely between the eyes, but the air was still.

She could only assume the worst.

If the Winter Soldier were ever to find himself compromised, he was equipped with a short-range handgun to assure he would not be taken alive. Small as it was, Natasha was certain she would have heard it go off, just as she was sure that if his room were jeopardized, radioing him would do no good. At best he would not hear it, and at worst the enemy would.

The only other one of her teammates in this building was stationed on the rooftop, which put Natasha closest to the third floor. She swallowed and pushed herself from her perch.

“Yes, that’s right. That’s a good man,” the first man was still saying into her ear as she crept up the stairs. “Slide it over to me.”

The third floor hallway was empty. She pattered on silent feet to the right door and drew her gun.

“I don’t think I will,” the second man said in her ear.

“You know all it will take is one word from me,” the first reminded. “I hold your life in my hands.”

“Like I said—” there was a smile in the second man’s voice, “—I do not underestimate my enemies.”

Natasha threw open the door. Evidence of a struggle were everywhere—upturned chairs, downed lights, and in the center of the floor two men in the process of trying to choke the other before they themselves lost the fight with consciousness.

A metal arm glinted in the light from the street. Natasha aimed for the head of the man it did not belong to and fired.

“What the devil—” the man first man yelled in her ear.

She never got a chance to find out exactly what had happened, because the floor suddenly shuddered beneath her feet. The Winter Soldier, in the process of pulling himself upright, stumbled against the nearest cabinet. A series of explosions rang loud in Natasha’s ears. The floor tilted violently sideways, throwing them both against the far wall. Natasha threw her arm up to shield her face from the spray of woodchips that followed. The floor gave another lurch.

It was the building. Someone had rigged the building to collapse.

The window was too far away to get to, and it would take scaling what remained of the floor to make t. It was time Natasha did not have. Her eyes scanned the room and landed upon the sturdiest object within reach, a large oaken wardrobe in the corner. The Winter Soldier had spotted it at the same instant. Natasha was closer to it and so reached it first, flinging it open to find it, of course, stuffed full with clothing. One person could fit inside, but it would unlikely hold two.

She turned, nearly falling over as the building dropped out beneath her by another good three feet. Her orders were clear; if it came down to the Winter Soldier’s life or hers, he was the more valuable. She fully intended to shove him inside, but the moment she reached out her hand to pull him in was the moment the ceiling finally gave way. Saw dust blinded her. Debris roared. Something hit her square in the chest so hard it knocked the air out of her and threw her backward into the coats, and then everything was tumbling end over end. She covered her head as best she could but there was no telling which way was up anymore. By the time movement stopped and the noise quieted, she was breathing hard and trapped in the dark, bruised, but alive.

She tried to lower her arms to feel around, but there was a weight thrown across her preventing most movement. At first she thought it was a support rebar that by some miracle had just narrowly missed impaling her head, but as her fingers felt around what they could reach she realized the metal around her head had too many interlocking plates to be building material.

The weight on her chest groaned. Natasha stopped breathing. Two fit inside afterall.

The only room Natasha had to move was to knock her right foot against the wood of the door. The sound came back hollow.

“Brace yourself,” she warned uselessly, and kicked.

It took two more blows to dislodge whatever small debris had fallen over the doors. The weight lifted as the Winter Soldier tumbled out into the smoky darkness. Natasha, finally able to breathe again, pulled herself out behind and coughed the sawdust from her lungs.

It was nearly pitch black and smelling of gunpowder, rotting wood and sitting water. She fumbled with her bracelets until she found one of her two-minute flares. Once lit, it illuminated the debris of the building spilling down into a damp, stone tunnel.

“Are you hurt?” was the first thing she asked. The Winter Soldier blinked at her. “Damage report,” she amended.

“Moderate,” he replied after rolling all his joints. The prosthetic he did last. “Mechanisms compromised.”

Sure enough, Natasha could make out under the red glint of the flare that there was a plate missing on his upper arm.

Natasha reached for her radio and was relieved to find it still intact.

“This is Spider Two,” she said into her reciever. One of her ear pieces had flown out somewhere between the explosions and the wardrobe, but luckily it was the one to the feed of the bugged room. “Does anyone copy?”

The only answer she got back was radio silence. Beside her, the Winter Soldier wandered in small circles until he found something on the floor and picked it up to study it.

“Does anyone copy?” She repeated. “One two, one two. This is Spider Two.”

The line was not dead; she had a connection, but no one was responding. The ready assumption would be that her receiver was malfunctioning, but she could only imagine one scenario where the rest of her team would not immediately demand a status report of the Winter Soldier after the building he had been stationed in was demolished before their eyes.

Regardless, whether one team member was wiped out or all of them, the next move did not change. There was a rendezvous point at the docks to the north of the city. One way or another, she had to get the Asset there by sunrise, else they would both be declared dead if they were lucky, and traitors if they were not. As it stood, she had no way to orient herself to the correct address, but it didn’t much matter. With half the tunnel clogged up with debris and their current position not guaranteed to be a safe one, there was only one way forward. Even if they grew helplessly lost and missed the rendezvous time, the Winter Soldier could allegedly be tracked remotely in the case of what the man in the briefing room had called “dramatic mission failure”. If this was not a dramatic failure, Natasha didn’t want to know what was.

“What do you have there?” She asked when he continued to be absorbed by the bit of warped metal in his hands.

He held it to the hole in his metal arm. It may have been a fit once, but something had dented it so severely it was practically crumpled.

“My locator,” he said.

So much for remote detection, not that two expert tracksmen really needed a homing beacon over their heads as a safety net. They still had most of the night. Still, a crazy notion in the back of Natasha’s mind reveled at the idea of being, for once, out of the Red Room’s omniscient gaze. All she would have to do was wait until sunrise, be pronounced dead, and she would be free. She knew better than to indulge the thought, of course. It was a temporary blip, nothing more. The Red Room had their ways, and if she took advantage of this momentary failure of their panopticon, there would be hell to pay. Besides, there was no getting around the fear real freedom brought with it. She honestly wouldn’t know what to do with herself if there were no orders. The thought of it was so horrifying, she immediately squashed the notion.

“We have to return to rendezvous,” she announced. The words tumbled out rushed and too loudly.

The Winter Soldier didn’t seem to notice. He looked down the underground tunnel that stretched off into impenetrable darkness, and then up at the hole which they had fallen through. The flare sputtered.

“How much light do we have?” he asked.

Natasha struck a second one just as the first flare flickered out. She checked the rest of her supplies. “Eight minutes.”

“Then we’ll need to make torches” he said. A knife appeared in his hand. “Cut the clothes into strips. I’ll find us wood.”

In the crumbled remains of an apartment building, wood was not hard to come by, though it took some hacking to get it into pieces small enough to hold comfortably. With one flare left, they set to binding one end of the wood pieces with strips of fabric. By the time they finished, the last of their light was threatening to give out. Natasha withdrew a lighter from her belt. She held it to the torch in her hand and watched what must have once been a nice pair of trousers brown and begin to smoke. The flare went out. For ten gut-wrenching seconds they found themselves in near impenetrable darkness. The only way Natasha would know if her eyes were open or closed was the wavering flicker of the lighter. Then, just as she was sure they would spend the rest of their lives in darkness, the torch caught.

She smiled at her companion from across the firelight. He did not smile back, and instead took the light from her and got to his feet.

“North,” he declared. “Let’s go.” She followed without question.

* * *

They marched on in silence through what Natasha could only assume was an old sewer system. To their great fortune the water level was minimal, and although they could not proceed without their footsteps echoing the entire way through the tunnel, the muck was not high enough to reach the tops of their boots.

Oddly enough, they passed no side-tunnels. Their twisting path was by no means a straight shot, but it was one entirely lacking in any choice but to press forward. Although it bore east more than Natasha would have liked, it lead them in a northerly direction through what she could only assume were the bowels of the city itself. In a city this old, tunnels like this one came as no surprise. What worried her was who else might know of them.

To conserve on torches, they only lit one at a time. Hands free and for lack of anything better to do, Natasha toyed with her knife. The light swishing noises of the blade slicing the air as she flipped and caught it again were nothing compared to the squelch of their footsteps, but none the less the Winter Soldier turned to peer at her. If she didn’t know better, she might think it was a look of curiosity. She waited for him to ask what he was doing, but he did not. It was hard to read his expression in the gloom, his face all angles and deep shadow.

“My sisters and I used to have contests to see who could come up with the most complicated pattern,” she told him, flinging the blade up into a blinding spin and catching it with her other hand. “Apparently it makes it harder for your opponent to disarm you, but between you and me I think it’s an excuse to show off.”

He watched her hands move in the firelight.

“Do you want to give it a try?” she asked.

He thrust the torch into her free hand as if he had been waiting for the opportunity. In return, she tossed him the knife.

He tested the weight of it in his palm. It was a good knife, light and sharp and well-balanced. He flipped it a few times in one hand before attempting the same twist and toss maneuver Natasha had just demonstrated, but he fumbled the catch and blade would have slipped into the water had Natasha not reached out and caught it mid-fall.

“Don’t worry, Sir,” she said as she handed it back to him handle out. “It’s going to take practice.”

He snatched it back and tried again with fierce concentration. Although he didn’t drop it the second time, it was hardly graceful movement. Still, Natasha couldn’t help but grin in self-satisfaction. After the weeks she’d spent just shy of evenly matched with him, it was nice to finally be the better at something. Rather, it was nice to be the better in a situation that didn’t end with them on opposite sides of the room at gunpoint.

She cleared her throat. “How’s your arm?” she asked.

“Damaged,” he replied curtly, but it was hard to tell if he did so out of spite or out of habit.

“Was it badly damaged from the electric shock?”

He caught the knife and gave her a quizzical look.

“Remember?” she asked, pulling from her belt the new disks the Red Room had given her several weeks after the incident. The new ones looked significantly more professional. They were still only one use each, but their reach had been greatly extended in addition to now being able to magnetize to surfaces. The Winter Soldier recognized it nonetheless.

“Yes, I do,” he answered, and to Natasha’s surprise he sounded almost amused. “That was some stunt.”

“What can I say?” she shrugged with a devilish smirk. “I don’t go down easy.”

“You don’t,” he agreed, and with so much honesty in his voice that Natasha was momentarily taken aback.

She hesitated before replying, not unsure that there wasn’t some catch. “Thank you, Sir.”

He caught the knife. “Why do you call me that?”

“What? ‘Sir’?”

“Yeah,” he said, flicking the knife into the air again. “Nobody calls me sir.”

Now that Natasha thought about it, she hadn’t heard anyone call him anything. Sure there were code names thrown around, but to his face he was addressed by neither name nor title.

“Shostakov told me to call you that,” she said. It was all the reason either needed. She paused. “What else is there to call you?”

He considered this, so much so that he momentarily stopped playing with the knife. “I don’t know,” he finally decide. “I can’t remember anyone calling me anything.”

“What do you mean you don’t remember?” she asked. “Everyone has a name.”

“I don’t,” he shook his head, more like he was trying to shake off a bad dream than in disagreement. “I thought you didn’t either.”

“Of course I do,” Natasha protested. “Didn’t they ever tell you?”

He shook his head again, now looking violently like a kicked dog. “I thought you were like me.”

“No, that’s something else,” she said. “Something they put in my blood. You do have a name though, at least you used to. I saw it.”

He stopped walking. She was forced to halt, too.

“What do you mean you _saw_ it?”

Without their footsteps, the tunnel was suddenly all too quiet. She could hear water drip somewhere very far away.

“I don’t think I’m supposed to know it,” she realized. She kept her voice low, but was unable to keep the twinge of fear out of it. People were killed for knowing things the Red Room didn’t give them permission to know. Her job was to collect secrets, but she was just the ear. The ear could do nothing unless it told all it knew to the brain, and if it failed this, it needed correcting. Natasha didn’t want to be corrected.

“But you—know it?” he asked, breathless.

He stood there, shoulders slack and eyes wide, ankle-deep in water. His grip on the blade was all but limp, but the look he was giving her held the most focus of any Natasha had never witnessed. This was a some new side of him she had never seen, perhaps was never meant to see.

She checked down both stretches of endless dark on either side. Water dripped. Nothing moved.

“You won’t tell anyone?” she asked, but already she knew the answer. He would be in as much trouble as she if anyone found out, perhaps more. It send a thrill of a shiver down her spine.

He gave the tiniest of head shakes, as if movement might shatter him. Neither dared to breathe.

Natasha checked the hall again. “I saw it on the cover of your file,” she whispered at last. Water dripped. “I didn’t get a very long look, but,” she tapped her temple. “Enhanced memory, you know?”

He did. It came with the speed and the strength and the accelerated healing.

“I’ll try to remember, but I’m not making any promises.”

He didn’t say anything, didn’t even move. She let her eyes fall closed and tried to focus.

Water dripped. Inhale, exhale.

It was two months ago. Briefing room, after their last sparring session. It was dark. There was a man. He wore a green tie and smelled of expensive aftershave. He had a mustache. His teeth were yellow. He put a file down on the table.

“Dealing number seventeen,” she read as the memory sharpened enough for her to recall the letters neatly printed on the front of the thick folder. “Tome twenty. Subject: Winter Soldier.”

Water dripped. No movement. Inhale, exhale.

“Formerly know as Sergeant...” The next words were foreign, of course they were. She couldn’t remember them as clearly. They had been hand-written lightly in pencil. She could nearly see the letters, small and delicate and upside down from her point of view.

Inhale, exhale. Dripping water. Silence.

“De,” she read, one letter at a time, face scrunched in concentration. “Zhe. Eh. Ee. Mm. Se. Dzhey...m...s?”

“James,” he breathed. The knife fell into the water with nothing but a faint gulp.

Natasha’s eyes flew open. He was at staring down into the darkness, pale as death. She followed his gaze in a panic, expecting to see Shostakov or some faceless doctor coming out of the gloom, but there was no one. When she looked back, he was scrutinizing his hands with the look of someone who couldn’t quite decide what constituted reality.

He shook his head. “I don’t remember,” he said so quietly she had to read his lips to understand. “I. I— can’t. Remember.”

“Remember what?” Natasha asked cautiously. “Is that your name? Is it James?” She couldn’t imagine what one would have had to go through to forget even one’s own name, but she would bet anything the Red Room had something to do with it. What had he done to earn that torture? Was she eventually to be reduced to the same?

He shook his head again. His eyes were wide and possibly full of tears, though that could well have been a trick of the light. “I can’t remember,” he repeated. “I can’t remember. It’s all—it’s all so—it’s familiar but I can’t—I can’t—I know that name but I—I don’t remember if it’s mine or—or—”

“Breathe,” she told him, suddenly forgetting completely about whatever vague horrors were set in stone for her, and closed the gap between them in two swift strides.

The water sloshing under her feet was deafening. Her free hand hovered over his shoulder before she finally dared set it down, and although he recoiled at the touch like it had stung him, but it did tear his eyes back to her and back to the present.

“Breathe,” she repeated, her eyes fixed on his.

He did. For one second—though it felt infinitely longer—he looked her in the eye and Natasha would not have believed in a million years that this man was anything other than human. And then he blinked and staggered back and caught his breath.

“Breathe,” she said again, although he was sucking down air just fine now. “Do you not like it?”

“What?” he gasped.

“Your name. The name. James.”

“It—” Much to her surprise, he let out a dry bark of a laugh and although he still looked somewhat shaken, he pushed himself to straighten up. “It sounds like an old man’s name.”

“You sure don’t look the part,” Natasha noted. She could speak English well enough to hide her accent, but not well enough to be able to discern the connotations of names. Then, before she could realize what a terrible idea it was, she added, “I think it sounds nice.”

He blinked. “You do?”

“I like it better than Sir.”

His eyes crinkled, but it wasn’t quite a smile. “Fair. I’ll take it. On one condition.”

Natasha cocked an eyebrow for him to go on.

“You know mine,” he reasoned. “What’s yours?”

“Same rules apply, you know,” she warned. “No telling.” Only when he nodded in agreement did she finally tell him, “Natalia Alianovna.” Her smile that dared him to pronounce it correctly.

“That’s two names,” he protested.

“Well, if I only get the one,” she sighed. “Natalia.”

“Natalia.” He tested the name, suddenly deep in thought again. “It’s...”

“Don’t say nice,” she warned him.

He fixed her with a look and took a step toward, and just like that Natasha found herself rooted in place. Her heart seemed to disagree vehemently with this course of action, hammering out of control as if to tell her to drop everything and run, but she didn’t yield to its demands.

He was no more than a hand’s length from her face. “I wasn’t going to,” he whispered.

He knew. He must know, despite her face schooled to betray nothing. Her stomach had long ago sunken into her boots to be replaced with ice and wind. She kept perfectly frozen still. He moved closer. A lifetime of training didn’t let her close her eyes.

Nothing happened. He bent down and fished her knife from the water where he’d dropped it. Then, wiping it on the front of his pants, he offered her the hilt.

“Show me that trick again,” he said.

She forced her shoulders to relax. She accepted the knife. The smile came much easier.

“Gladly.”

* * *

They walked and Natasha let the mission to push everything else to the back of her mind. One torch burned down, then a second. When at last they finally passed a corridor branching off from their course it lead east and they chose to pass it by. An hour later, they took one that turned west instead.

Not far into this tunnel, it became apparent that the water beneath their feet was moving. Pretty soon it was flowing rather steadily in the same direction they were headed. Then, without warning, they rounded a corner and there was a light at the end. Natasha allowed herself a silent sigh of relief. No dead ends, no mercy suicide to keep from starving forever in a damp stone prison far from home.

Near the mouth of the tunnel, James held out his hand for her to halt. She watched as he pulled a handgun from his belt and edged himself to the opening slowly, so as to keep from splashing. He peeked both ways and motioned her closer, only to stop her from getting any further than he was. He put his finger to his lips and pointed.

The tunnel opened as a drainage pipe beneath a bridge onto to a shallow river. Judging by the manner of garbage caught fighting its lazy current, it couldn’t have been more than waist deep. Natasha followed James’s finger to where he pointed at what she at first thought was an empty patch of water until she noticed the shadow.

On the bridge, downstream from the opening, was the shape of a man with a rifle strapped to his back. Natasha peered past it to the next bridge. She could see it, but she couldn’t see a way to get to it without being seen. Even attempting it would make them out like rabbits during open season. Trudging through water, they would easy target practice even for a child.

She backed further into the mouth of the drain pipe.

“Do we turn back?” she asked. Already she knew it wasn’t an option. This was their only way forward, and with the sky already brightening they didn’t have the time to scour out another or wait the watchmen out.

James must have had the same thought. “Do you have a silencer?” he asked.

“It’s suicide,” Natasha argued. “He has the advantageous position. Getting a killing shot is next to impossible from this angle and that’s assuming we catch him by surprise.”

“Next to impossible does not impossible make,” James countered. “That’s the first thing. The second thing is that you don’t need a killing shot.” Natasha crossed her arms and waited for what had better be a life-changing explanation. “We just need to blind him,” he said. “So do you have a silencer or don’t you?”

Natasha pursed her lips and handed the torch off to him so she could slide a silencer from her bracelet. As if it was even a question that she had on one her. Instead of handing it to him, however, she twisted it onto a pistol of her own.

“It’s still suicide,” she told him as she tightened it in place. “If this doesn’t work, shoot him as he’s leaning over the edge to see if I’m really dead, then follow the river to the docklands. It’ll be warehouse 15. There’s a little skull with tentacles carved into the doorframe.”

She started to brush past him, but he caught her arm.

“I’m going,” she said before he could get a word of protest in. “Orders from the top. Your life is worth more than mine.”

His grip loosened and she didn’t look back to see why. Instead, she hurried to put distance between them as she slipped silently into the icy dark water and swiftly pressed herself against the wall just upstream of the drain pipe. The shadow of the patrolman moved as the man peeked over the edge of the bridge to see what had made the noise. Natasha held perfectly still. Only when the shadow returned to position did she allow herself to let out the breath she had been holding. Her fingers found a small stone in the wall of the canal and a plan began to materialize in her mind. She clutched pebble tightly and pushed off the wall.

She moved forward at an agonizing pace to keep her ripples to a minimum, finding it best not to even think about the watchful eyes of her teacher following her the entire way. When she finally reached the edge of the shadow’s bridge, she stopped and looked up.

It was a policeman, out enforcing curfew no doubt. She could just make out the back of his head as he leaned against the railing to watch the stars. She edged another step forward and, dragging in a breath she knew could well be her last, lobbed the pebble as far as she could. It flew silent and invisible, landing in the tiniest of splashes downstream. The guard jumped, whirled in place so quickly his hat nearly flew off, and lunged forward to squint into the dark where the sound originated. Beneath him, Natasha took aim and fired.

As soon as the gun went off, a splash from under the bridge told her that James was in the water. She didn’t stop to confirm more than that as she dove down into the frigid current and swam as quickly as she could. She pushed on as long as her lungs would hold, and when the dark behind her eyelids grew darker with the passing shadow of the next bridge, she swam sharply right until her hands found the slippery stones of the wall and then allowed herself to surface, gasping.

It was colder than she could have ever imagined. A moment later, she stepped out of the way of a dark shape catching up behind her, groping for the wall. He surfaced looking every bit like a drowned rat, and if Natasha didn’t look as ridiculous herself, she might have laughed.

Not far behind him, a policeman’s hat floated leisurely along and straight past.

“Not bad,” he mouthed, glancing behind them at the form slumped against the bridge railing.

Natasha shrugged and dove under again.

* * *

It was only two more bridges until the river widened and kept widening into the sea. Natasha was numb in places she didn’t realize she had. She clenched her teeth to keep them from chattering as they finally found a dock with a ladder, but she knew even before she stepped out that the biting winds of the arctic circle would be infinitely worse than water that, at the very least, was guaranteed to be warmer than ice.

She wrung out her hair and tried to rub feeling back into her arms as she waited for James to crawl up behind her. He shook his hair out like a dog. Murderers they might be, neither looked dignified enough to seem the part now.

Guns wet and useless, they slunk through shadows and back alleyways on luck and prayer and instinct. They ran into one other watchmen, and Natasha slit his throat without even a twinge of remorse.

She turned to leave him as he was, but a rustling behind her forced her to stop. She was relieved to see that it was only James, though why he was now attempting one-handed to drag the body presumably out of sight was anyone’s guess.

“Leave him,” she hissed. “We’re almost there.”

The damage to his left arm not improved by half an hour’s soak, he was forced to leverage a leg against the dead man’s neck to yank his jacket the rest of the way off. It was a little bloodied, but otherwise dry and no doubt very warm. Natasha felt instantly stupid and jealous she hadn’t realized the opportunity first.

What she in no way expected was for him to walk up and drop it over her shoulders.

“Orders from the top,” he said as he passed. “Dibs on the next one.”

She watched him saunter ahead, twirling the knife just as she had shown him. The jacket really was as warm as it looked. For the first time in a long time—years perhaps—a genuine smile crept up behind her and caught her by surprise. Genuine because, first and foremost, it was meant for no one but herself. She pulled the jacket tighter over her shoulders.

He truly was an idiot.

* * *

She stood under the spotlight, all drawn shoulders and stiff jaw, as if she were facing a firing line with every drop of her dignity.

“Mission unsuccessful,” she reported.

“Not entirely,” Shostakov said without even looking up from his reports. “You’ve demonstrated your ability to supervise and recover the Winter Soldier.” He looked up. His smile reminded Natasha of the cats from fairy tales.

“Congratulations, Agent Romanoff,” he purred. “You’ve entered Phase III.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Haitus. If you made it this far, congrats! Let me know if it's worth continuing.


End file.
